If Abbott Laboratories were looking for an ardent spokesman to tout its AIDS drug, Dr. Andrew M. Pavlatos would fit the bill. Abbott's Norvir, he decrees, "decreases the viral load better than all other protease inhibitors," the new class of AIDS drugs that is renewing hope in the battle against the deadly disease. Using Norvir in combination with another protease inhibitor and other AIDS drugs, Pavlatos says he has seen "a large number come back from the dead . . . who have gone...

Abbott Laboratories won a federal appeals court ruling dismissing claims the company maintained a monopoly and overcharged for its HIV medicine Norvir. After North Chicago-based Abbott quadrupled prices for the drug in 2003, patients, advocacy groups and drug-benefit providers sued. Claims included the accusation that Abbott tried to create a monopoly for Kaletra, an HIV treatment it makes that contains Norvir, a performance booster of so-called protease inhibitors. Abbott...

A new AIDS drug in development by Abbott Laboratories is being hailed by researchers as more potent while having minimal side effects when compared to existing protease inhibitors already on the market. North Chicago-based Abbott's ABT-378 is reducing the levels of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, below detectable levels in some 90 percent of patients while none of those studied has discontinued treatments due to short-term side effects, according to data presented Monday in Chicago at the 6th...

Yet another protease inhibitor is attempting to chip away at Abbott Laboratories' blockbuster AIDS drug sales in the U.S. A new study this week shows Johnson & Johnson's protease inhibitor Prezista is "non-inferior" to Abbott's Kaletra. There are about 10 protease inhibitors on the U.S. market, including about a half-dozen newer, next-generation drugs such as Prezista, which are considered more tolerable to AIDS patients. Although Kaletra's sales were up worldwide,...

Abbott Laboratories' protease inhibitor Norvir is receiving a major boost at this week's 12th World AIDS Conference in Geneva, where researchers report it increases the effectiveness of similar drugs, providing a more potent treatment for the virus that causes AIDS. Protease inhibitors block enzymes in the human immunodeficiency virus, and their use in "cocktails" of drugs to treat HIV are credited with a dramatic decline in the number of U.S. deaths from AIDS. Researchers are hoping such...

AIDS deaths in California dropped 60 percent in the first six months of 1997, and experts said it was largely due to the widespread use of protease inhibitors and other drugs. There were 1,112 AIDS-related deaths from January to June, compared with 2,788 in the same period in 1996. "It's astonishingly good news," Derek Gordon, a spokesman for the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, said Friday. "The big question for us now becomes: How long will this last?" Nationally, the latest...

Abbott Laboratories on Friday defended its pricing practices for HIV medicines in the face of protests and criticism from religious groups and AIDS activists who attended the company's annual shareholders meeting. In the U.S., Abbott has drawn criticism for raising the price of its HIV treatment Norvir by 400 percent in December, to $8.57 a day from $1.75 a day. AIDS activists say this could jeopardize patients' access to Norvir. More than 40 protesters representing AIDS groups and other...

GARLIC: According to some new evidence, garlic may help ward off lung cancer. Penn State researchers say there's a compound in garlic--diallyl trisulfide-- that helped keep human lung-tumor cells from growing. ELDERBERRIES: New research indicates that elderberries thwart the flu virus in two ways: Proteins in the fruit block spikes of hemagglutinin (what a virus uses to puncture and infect a healthy cell), while anthocyanins (the fruit's pigment) turn off an enzyme...

Abbott Laboratories has drawn fire from AIDS activists in the United States for raising the price of its well-known HIV drug by more than 400 percent. Norvir, one of the earlier treatments for HIV, isn't the top-seller it once was, but it is commonly used to boost the effectiveness of other treatments used in so-called AIDS cocktails, which have been hailed in fighting the deadly disease. Abbott has raised the wholesale price of Norvir to $8.57 a day, or $257.10 a month, from $1.75 a day,...

An experimental compound that is able to block the replication of the AIDS virus in the test tube has been developed by scientists at Abbott Laboratories, North Chicago. The compound is one of a number of protease inhibitors that drug companies are working on to develop new approaches to kill the AIDS virus. The inhibitors work by blocking the activity of the key protease enzyme, which the virus needs to assemble itself in an infected cell. The Abbott compound is a new type of molecule that was...

The World Health Organization on Sunday called on developing countries to train and organize 100,000 health-care and non-professional workers to carry out its plan to begin delivering anti-retroviral drugs to 3 million AIDS patients by the end of 2005. The United Nations agency said 6 million of the 40 million people infected with the AIDS virus are in immediate need of anti-retroviral treatment but that only about 480,000 are receiving it. The new program, which the agency said would cost at...

Agouron to give away AIDS drug: Agouron Pharmaceuticals Inc. said today it will give away its experimental AIDS drug, Viracept, to people in an advanced stage of the disease who have exhausted other treatments. It will be offered to people who have stopped using three commercially available protease inhibitors because of adverse reactions, intolerable side effects or because they haven't worked. The drug is being made available to people for whom no other comparable or...

Unlike most earlier AIDS treatments, Abbott Laboratories' popular drug Kaletra is like the Energizer bunny in its ability to keep the deadly HIV virus suppressed for long periods of time. The drug lasts and lasts for its patients, a new study indicates. Kaletra has kept HIV at undetectable levels in nearly two-thirds of patients who have taken it for five years, according to new research unveiled at this week's Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy,...

A triple-punch combination of an experimental new AIDS drug and two others already on the market is by far the most potent treatment yet for people infected with the deadly virus, researchers reported Monday. The therapy does not cure AIDS. At best, it will slow and perhaps stall the disease for long periods. Even this could be a significant advance because available virus medicines do little to extend AIDS patients' lives. The treatment involves one of a new class of drugs...

An experimental drug to treat the common cold could possibly be modified to treat the SARS virus, according to German researchers who on Tuesday published the first model of an enzyme used by the deadly respiratory virus to replicate itself and infect cells. The rapid scientific publication of the research, which the journal Science posted online Tuesday, indicates the urgent response by the research community to the SARS epidemic that has killed at least 570 people worldwide. However, not only...

AIDS drugs approved in Europe: The European Commission has approved two AIDS-fighting drugs for sale in the 15-member European Union. The drugs are Crixivan, produced by Merck Co., and Invirase, produced by Hoffman-La Roche. The products, already on the market in the U.S., are known as "protease inhibitors" and block enzymes that are the key to replication of the AIDS virus. Approval followed a positive recommendation from the European Medicines Evaluation Agency.

Abbott Laboratories is expected to disclose Tuesday that an experimental AIDS drug due on the market this fall is proving effective in patients who have failed to respond to other treatments. Results being released this week at the World AIDS Conference in Durban, South Africa, show that Abbott's Kaletra suppresses HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, in 70 percent or more of patients who failed to respond to at least two other drugs. Few patients also experienced side effects,...